Literacy in Limburgian bidialectal children: The effect of raising Limburgian children bilingually on their reading and writing abilities
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2018-04-18
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en
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A prejudice still prevalent today is the thought that speaking a Limburgian dialect has a negative influence on the language abilities of a Limburgian child going to primary school. However, proper evidence in the form of scientific research to counter this prejudice does not yet exist. Therefore, the current study examined whether one can speak of a possible relationship between speaking a Limburgian dialect and the reading and writing abilities in Dutch within primary school children in Limburg of grade 4 and 8. In this study, it was hypothesized that there would be no or a positive relationship between the reading and writing abilities of bilingual (bidialectal) Limburgian children speaking a local Limburgian variety and Dutch. CITO spelling and reading comprehension skills test scores and language background information from 283 primary school children in Limburg were collected and analysed statistically to answer the research question of this study. A five-way independent factorial ANOVA revealed that there is a positive relationship between speaking a Limburgian dialect and performance on the Dutch spelling test and that there is no relationship between speaking a dialect and performance on the Dutch reading test. Furthermore, it was found that there is a positive relationship between the amount of spelling and reading scores and the library visits of the bidialectal children. Finally, positive relationships were found for the amount of reading of the child itself to other persons, the amount of library visits, the amount of reading by the parents and the height of the spelling test scores. Especially the bilingual children seem to benefit from more frequent reading by their parents and library visits. Finally, we can draw the conclusion that the beliefs that many Limburgian governmental institutions, teachers and parents have, namely saying that Limburgian bidialectal children have lower writing and reading abilities than Limburgian monolingual children, are false.
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